Hepcat

Here then are some more! I've taken some new pictures of three of my display cabinets. First my main model kit cabinet: Then my board game, lunch box and overflow model kit cabinet: Finally, the overflow cabinet in Ace's bedroom where I keep and display whatever cool stuff for which there isn't sufficient room in my comic and toy room: I like to think that it's still the best third toy cabinet on the block.

Negative superheroes:

Wow! Impressive feat! (thumbs u

I found some really good pictures of the London, Ontario that was during my formative years. Unfortunately the only thing they lack is me! Here's a picture of the Arena Dairy Bar on York Street sometime in the fifties: Sadly I have no memory of this old time dairy bar but it must have been located right by the old London Arena a few blocks away from our house. I have really fond memories of going to the London Arena for the Labatt Brewing Company's employee Xmas party with cake, ice cream, cookies, a magician and finally Santa Claus with a specially wrapped present for each and every kid in attendance! The London Arena also featured roller skating and wrestling with grapplers such as Whipper Billy Watson, Johnny Valentine, D*ck "the Bulldog" Brower and Sweet Daddy Siki in the fifties and sixties. I also attended a concert by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention in the London Arena in 1972. Robb's Dairy Bar was located two very short blocks away from where my card collecting buddy Tony lived. Drat, but it closed sometime in the late fifties and I don't remember ever seeing it. One of the things that I do remember from those early years and sorely miss is milk delivery in returnable refillable bottles! I remember Borden's, Silverwood Dairy, London Pure Milk Company and Mark Ayres Dairy delivery vehicles prowling London's leafy streets: My home town dairy, Silverwood, grew by acquisition to become the largest dairy in Canada by the late sixties and still provided home delivery service in certain markets well into the seventies(eighties?). Both Silverwood Dairy and the London Pure Milk Company still had horse drawn milk wagons wending their way along London streets until sometime in the mid-sixties. It was back in 1963-64 that my mother and I saw that the train car being backed into the Labatt Breweries plant had somehow collided with a Silverwood's horse much to the detriment of the latter. Her uncharitable comment at the time was that Labatt didn't want people to drink milk. Here are a couple of pictures of Silverwood's milk wagons: Here's a picture of a more modern sixties state-of-the-art London Pure Milk Company wagon: We also had home bread delivery from London's own Lewis Bakeries for a while when we lived in Manor Park on the edge of London in the fifties. Many a housewife's household budget was blown succumbing to the pastry temptations proferred that day by the bread man! Best of all though my buddy Dave had a job helping the Jackson's Bakeries bread man make his deliveries Saturday mornings. Talk about a marriage made in heaven! All the delivery man had to do was drive since he had a young boy doing most of the work for him, and Dave got to ride around in a very cool bread delivery truck and run to each house on the route carrying bread in a basket! I'll have to ask Dave whether he received anything more than free tarts and other pastries for his efforts.... I also have a hazy memory of having journeyed to the beach with my mother and sister on the London & Port Stanley Railway one summer day in 1957(?). It would have been on an interurban car like this beautifully restored one that's part of the collection of the Hallton County Radial Railway Museum: On the extreme right hand side of this picture of the main Richmond Street and Dundas Street intersection of London from 1960 or so the United Cigar Store sign is visible. I bought many of my comics in that store. Look at the riot of neon in this picture looking west along Dundas Street circa 1960! Here's a picture of the Kresge store in downtown London circa 1952, the year of my birth: That was the store where I first saw a Marx Great Garloo in 1961 and discovered the Aurora monster model kits a year or so later. Just beyond it the Metropolitan(Met) store can be seen. The Met's lunch counter did such a thriving business that they had a satellite take-out counter at the front of the store where office workers could quickly grab a hamburger, hot dog, French fries, coffee, donut, etc. to go. Across the street to the left in the picture was a Woolworth store. Directly to the right of the camera man was a Zellers store. My mother used to take me in tow and haunt them all. I lived for hitting her up for a steel bowl of ice cream at one of the lunch counters after she was fully shopped out. And here's a picture from the fifties of Cowan Hardware on Dundas Street where I used to go to admire toys and model kits. Cowan's was also where I raced my Monogram Ferrari slot cars after a slot car track was installed upstairs in 1965(?). Good times! Just out of the picture was the Ontario Conservatory of Music where I lugged my accordion on the bus for my weekly lessons. Not entirely good times. Finally here's a great shot of the Victoria Theater circa 1956 which was just off Dundas on a side street. The Victoria was a classic grindhouse with a balcony from which kids would fling flattened popcorn boxes onto the poor unfortunates below. This of course would prompt warnings from chagrined ushers that throwing objects from the balcony was strictly forbidden. The Hyland was my neighbourhood theatre in London where in the early sixties I used to take in Saturday matinee double features with a cartoon for $0.20: Here it is these days:

I like all things Atlas too! And I really like Atlas war comics because so many stories were based on the Korean war with jets, helicopters and other "modern" weaponry! (thumbs u

I understand that Doug has a reputation for "fluffing" prices. High ones he trumpets; low ones he trys to quietly sweep under the carpet.

Great dinosaur! That may be my favourite Cave Carson cover of them all.

All kids love bubbles, don't they?

Oh wow! That's a really nice one! And it's brutally tough to find in that condition.

Ahhhhh, but did you do the hoarding of these comics when they were first published? That you see is my point. Eighties books were already being hoarded/stored when they first came out, leaving basically zero chance of future appreciation.

I would say a resounding "no" to 99.9999% of 1980s books I'd say pretty much the same thing about 99.9999% of all books. golden age there are some 300 really "blue" chip type books...that works out to about 1.3% (so 98.7% would not be good horading candidates)... I think it is a little higher for silver age (about 2%)... but for all other eras, 99.99 works fine (thumbs u This talk of keys misses the point though. Keys don't escalate in price in a vacuum, i.e. they don't go up by themselves. They go up as the overall price level of similar comics escalates. As issue #1 rises in price, so do #2 and #3 etc, albeit the percentages may differ of course. The keys escalate until collectors perceive that the other issues in the run are a better "value" at which the price relationship "corrects". The reason why almost no eighties comics are likely to increase in price during our lifetimes though is because they've all been hoarded/saved. The only reason older comics have gone up in value/price is because of the almost total destruction factor since they were published. Therefore, any comics that are hoarded don't subsequently increase in value. Why should they? There's enough supply to satisfy whatever demand exists for the comic. So anything that collectors have seen fit to hoard in recent decades has been a subsequent dud in the marketplace, for precisely that reason.

Hmmmmm. Yeah, below the scalp to ear line there are distinct similarities:

I agree! The World of Fantasy and the Patsy and Hedy on this page are absolutely fabulous. I just don't understand why these titles aren't more popular with Marvel collectors.

So here in 1959 this handsome green fellow appeared on the cover of Detective Comics: So captivated by his personal magnetism were we all that Louis Marx and Company named him Great Garloo and had him on every toy shelf in stores across the nation in 1961: After growing a tail, back he was in 1966 for a return engagement with DC adventure heroes in Sea Devils 28:

Alright then. Here are front and back scans of three more of my Mad magazines:

I've always wished that Cave Carson had graduated to his own title.

For the most part. Some books may push the envelope by a year or two, like Two Gun Kid #24. (It's ok by me). I'm sure there have been a few others, but the vast majority, I'm going be memory here, have been Silver Age books. We've actually had quite a few Golden Age-Silver Age pairings.

I agree! I thought the Wyatt Earp title though short lived was particularly compelling. Here's another cover theme snatch on the part of editor George Kashdan:

If you backed me into a corner and forced me to choose my favourite from all the fantastic My Greatest Adventure covers you fellows have been posting, I'd first be narrowing it down to the above two.

Has anyone else noticed that Batwoman made regular cover appearances in World's Finest while I don't think Supergirl ever did?

Here's my entry to the #282 club:

Hey! I never thought to associate those two comics before you pointed that out to me! Just goes to show that you can notice something new amongst the familiar every day.

Wow! Too cool! Not many of us have any of the actual copies we bought as kids. Not surprising! I can see why.

Krypto was particularly cool when he was less anatomically correct in the early fifties!

Krypto covers are my favourite in the line!